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INVISO: A Cross-platform User Interface for Creating Virtual Sonic Environments

Published: 20 October 2017 Publication History

Abstract

The predominant interaction paradigm of current audio spatialization tools, which are primarily geared towards expert users, imposes a design process in which users are characterized as stationary, limiting the application domain of these tools. Navigable 3D sonic virtual realities, on the other hand, can support many applications ranging from soundscape prototyping to spatial data representation. Although modern game engines provide a limited set of audio features to create such sonic environments, the interaction methods are inherited from the graphical design features of such systems, and are not specific to the auditory modality. To address such limitations, we introduce INVISO, a novel web-based user interface for designing and experiencing rich and dynamic sonic virtual realities. Our interface enables both novice and expert users to construct complex immersive sonic environments with 3D dynamic sound components. INVISO is platform-independent and facilitates a variety of mixed reality applications, such as those where users can simultaneously experience and manipulate a virtual sonic environment. In this paper, we detail the interface design considerations for our audio-specific VR tool. To evaluate the usability of INVISO, we conduct two user studies: The first demonstrates that our visual interface effectively facilitates the generation of creative audio environments; the second demonstrates that both expert and non-expert users are able to use our software to accurately recreate complex 3D audio scenes.

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Cited By

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  • (2023)Immerscape: Supporting the Creation of Immersive Soundscapes by Users in Cultural Heritage ContextsAdvances in Mobile Computing and Multimedia Intelligence10.1007/978-3-031-48348-6_15(179-186)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2023
  • (2022)PlugSonic: a web- and mobile-based platform for dynamic and navigable binaural audioEURASIP Journal on Audio, Speech, and Music Processing10.1186/s13636-022-00250-x2022:1Online publication date: 15-Jul-2022
  • (2022)Characterising Soundscape Research in Human-Computer InteractionProceedings of the 2022 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3532106.3533458(1394-1417)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2022
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  1. INVISO: A Cross-platform User Interface for Creating Virtual Sonic Environments

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      UIST '17: Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology
      October 2017
      870 pages
      ISBN:9781450349819
      DOI:10.1145/3126594
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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      Published: 20 October 2017

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      Author Tags

      1. 3D audio
      2. browser-based interface
      3. design environment
      4. virtual reality
      5. virtual sonic environments

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      UIST '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 73 of 324 submissions, 23%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 561 of 2,567 submissions, 22%

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      View all
      • (2023)Immerscape: Supporting the Creation of Immersive Soundscapes by Users in Cultural Heritage ContextsAdvances in Mobile Computing and Multimedia Intelligence10.1007/978-3-031-48348-6_15(179-186)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2023
      • (2022)PlugSonic: a web- and mobile-based platform for dynamic and navigable binaural audioEURASIP Journal on Audio, Speech, and Music Processing10.1186/s13636-022-00250-x2022:1Online publication date: 15-Jul-2022
      • (2022)Characterising Soundscape Research in Human-Computer InteractionProceedings of the 2022 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3532106.3533458(1394-1417)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2022
      • (2021)Design and Evaluation of a Web- and Mobile-Based Binaural Audio Platform for Cultural HeritageApplied Sciences10.3390/app1104154011:4(1540)Online publication date: 8-Feb-2021
      • (2021)A survey of 3D audio through the browser: practitioner perspectives2021 Immersive and 3D Audio: from Architecture to Automotive (I3DA)10.1109/I3DA48870.2021.9610839(1-10)Online publication date: 8-Sep-2021
      • (2020)E-Learning Management System Based on Reality Technology with AIInternational Journal of Information and Education Technology10.18178/ijiet.2020.10.4.137310:4(259-264)Online publication date: 2020
      • (2020)Teaching immersive media at the "dawn of the new everything"Proceedings of the 15th International Audio Mostly Conference10.1145/3411109.3411121(229-232)Online publication date: 15-Sep-2020
      • (2020)A review of audio-visual interaction on soundscape assessment in urban built environmentsApplied Acoustics10.1016/j.apacoust.2020.107372166(107372)Online publication date: Sep-2020
      • (2019)What is Mixed Reality?Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3290605.3300767(1-15)Online publication date: 2-May-2019
      • (2019)Applying Game Mechanics to Networked Music HCI SystemsMethionine Dependence of Cancer and Aging10.1007/978-3-319-92069-6_14(223-241)Online publication date: 7-Feb-2019

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